TL;DR: If you can help yourself, please don't comment on my appearance here or when you see me!
Trigger warning: bump picture
Please take a good look and familiarise yourself with the picture below so that you do not have to do it when you see me!
With restrictions starting to lift and the end of the Easter holidays I am going to be seeing lots of people I haven't seen for a while. I have written recently about the difficulties of coping with change, particularly change I feel out of control of and when I can't decide when and how I present it to the people around me.
For this reason I am posting a picture of what I look like now. This post and posting a picture of my body, which I would never normally do, is an attempt to feel in some control of the situation. In reality I can't choose whether people see my baby bump and whether they comment on it, but if I choose to post it here then I am choosing when they see it, and informing them of how they can help me by reducing the number of comments I have to deal with by one. It is the opposite of looking for reassurance or compliments: those would make me feel much worse. The only people whose judgments on my body I need to hear are the fact-based responses of my medical team who monitor my baby's wellbeing (which is thankfully excellent so far).
I have to familiarise myself daily with my image to try and accustom myself to the ever-changing picture that greets me and help me process the ever-changing sensations of my baby-growing body and what it can and can't do.
Perhaps if you have had a chance to do it before seeing me I will not have quite so many change- and body-related comments to deal with when I start seeing people again. Don't worry if you do it by accident, I know people are excited (Mr Peggy and I are the most excited of all!) and it is a natural comment to make, and I know you all well enough to know that you would never mean to cause any hurt or difficulty with such comments. I just have a brain that interprets every one of these comments, no matter how positive, complimentary and lovely, into an alert of Change. And in an autistic brain, change is scary and bad even if it's a good change and for a good reason. By avoiding comment you might be able to reduce those alerts by one!
So if you can, hold your comments on my lovely bump and your opinion of its size or shape or neatness or messiness (although I've never heard someone comment on a "messy" baby bump!!) or how well I look until you are at a distance where I can't hear you. Ask how I'm feeling or how I'm sleeping or how work is going or what I got up to in the Easter holidays, or better still tell me how you are! What you've been up to, how you're feeling about the changes in restrictions or anything else important that's going on for you.
Is there anything you'd like people to be aware of when reuniting after lockdown?
